It is not a good day for Steve Liesman. First the market dropped after what everyone at propaganda central thought would make the crew at the soon to be Comcast subsidiary wear their "Dow 10,000 (not adjusted for dollar devaluation)" hat courtesy of yet more massaged Case-Shiller data. But then Tim Geithner's favorite mouthpiece made the horrible mistake of engaging in a factually-backed and reasoned debate with Michael Pento. Alas, unlike the traditional monologues in which Mr. Liesman excels in dogmatic and reasonless argumentation, when facts are needed to justify claims, propaganda houses of cards tend to collapse with a bang, not a whimper. The same happened earlier today when Liesman proved to his producer what an epic fail it is to engage GE cheerleader #1 in anything more than monologues for the conceivable future.

A new global study has confirmed what many market participants may already feel - that technical analysis doesn't work.

Interestingly, this latest study appears to have been conducted by Massey University in cooperation with Australia's Macquarie Capital and Macquarie Bank.

SSRN: Technical analysis is not consistently profitable in the 49 countries that comprise the Morgan Stanley Capital Index once data snooping bias is accounted for. There is some evidence that technical trading rules perform better in emerging markets than developed markets, which is consistent with the finding of previous studies that these markets are less efficient, but this result is not strong. While we cannot rule out the possibility that technical analysis compliments other market timing techniques or that trading rules we do not test are profitable, we do show that over 5,000 trading rules do not add value beyond what may be expected by chance when used in isolation.

It would be great to have access to the full research piece. We wonder if it will have any impact on Macquarie's technical research. Doubt it.

We also doubt it will change the behavior of most technical traders. (Via Alea)

Deja Vu Markets: Low Volume Ramp To Thursday's VWAP

Yet another listless day with no volume participation, as trading turgidity has set in and programs are back in control. Expect the market to taper off somewhere around Thursday's closing VWAP (red line) unless some real volume shows up which as the past 6 months have shown, is practically always to the downside.

Update: thru VWAP now. Right on schedule. Computers keep on humming.

Here's a fun fact. Paper sold the open, locals bought the dips. That break out at 34.5 was a paper order that triggered buy stops and was again sold into by paper while locals bought.

These were real people in the pit doing this today.....

But, maybe you didn't see the USD get a beat down again driving equities and equity futures higher. Maybe you also missed crude soar off its lows. See, the stock market is the bitch of the global capital markets, not the other way around.